Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!

In the first film Morgan Spurlock ate McDonald's for a month. Here he goes further and opens his own chicken restaurant. The aim is to show from inside how the industry's language of healthiness actually works. He examines farmers' contracts, tours the sheds, demonstrates how legally empty phrases like pasture raised or all natural really are, and then opens a restaurant using precisely that language and finds customers. The film's harshest section is his conversations with chicken farmers. Spurlock frames it around debt and the tournament grading system: the farmers own their sheds but are bound by the company's rules and carrying loans. The film's own story is part of it. It screened in Toronto in 2017 and YouTube bought distribution rights for three and a half million dollars. Later that year, when Spurlock published a piece confessing a history of sexual misconduct, YouTube withdrew the film and its Sundance screening was cancelled. It did not reach cinemas until 2019, through Samuel Goldwyn Films. Who it is for: viewers interested in the food industry and the language of marketing. Who it is not for: anyone troubled by Spurlock placing himself at the centre as narrator.